After more than three years of posting something every day, I am putting the site on hiatus. Basically, life has intruded to an extent I am having trouble maintaining roughly three months of material in reserve at any given time. Why three months? That’s the same amount of time the syndicates for newspaper cartoonists require their artists to maintain a backlog in event of any unforeseen circumstances. As for why I feel I the need to follow the standards of a rather quaint profession, I have no idea. It just seemed like a good habit to develop. Anyhoo, no regular updates to the site for the time being, and I am not sure when those will resume.
Yesterday marked the end of one such unexpected life event, though I am going to be struggling with this one for a while. Also, following the rule that nature abhors a vacuum, there are still several other issues happening, none of which I will be addressing here.
As I have written before, we lost our male cat last August, somebody to whom I had a deep attachment. I realize how ridiculous this may sound to some people, but I am still grieving. That we also have our female cat, Aggie, is quite a comfort, but things just haven’t been the same since. I did not want to look for another cat, though I suspected we would have another one at some point.
Parallel to this, the owner of the house next to us is a woman of advanced enough years that I used to wonder how she was faring on her own. She was put into assisted living sometime late last year, though I wasn’t aware of it when it happened. Something else I did not know was she had two cats, and her relatives were only able to catch one of them. The one who got away had leaped out of a guy’s arms, through the screen of a patio door and off a second-story balcony. Keep this in mind for later.
Without knowing whose cat it might be, we started seeing an orange boy around our yard in December. I would leave a bowl of food out and check the security camera the next day. The time between me setting out food and him approaching the bowl kept getting shorter. We became increasingly concerned as the windchills dropped into the sub-zero range, while also believing it likely he was in the neighbor’s detached garage, as the walk-in door was always open. Just the same, I put a towel in the base of a pet carrier, put a raincoat around it in an attempt at weatherproofing, and sat it against the front of the house the best I could in a way that kept the door of it open while hopefully keeping most of the wind out.
Around the first of the year, we were finally able to sit outside while he ate some distance away. We kept gradually moving the bowl closer to the house each time. Finally, I hazarded an upturned hand, and he rubbed his face against it. By January 9th, I was leaving the food bowl in the back of the pet carrier. That night, I managed to close the door on him, and we whisked him away to the vet, where he received a gauntlet of vaccinations.
We named him Hank, just because the name seemed fitting for a big guy who was tough enough to survive in the conditions he was in. The vet determined that, based on the condition of his teeth, he was between one and one-and-a-half years old. Though lean, he was big-boned and muscular, weighing in at twelve pounds.
After coming back to our house, we isolated him in the basement laundry room, so that he could get acclimated to the house. This would also allow Aggie to hopefully adjust to his presence by smelling him under the door. Then he was back at the vet the next week to get neutered and chipped, followed by a week of recovery in the laundry room.
In the time he was in quarantine, he would alternate between shying away from us and being deeply affectionate. I could often just pick him up and put him in my lap, and he would start purring and making biscuits. I thought, “This can work.” I told him I would never betray him.
I’m a liar.
It isn’t that I did not want things to work out, because I desperately wanted this to be his home. The first obvious problem was the age differences. Aggie is likely nine years older than him. That he has the energy of a kitten was deeply stressing to somebody who took years to adjust to living with us. That he is also twice her size and weight made him chasing her around the house downright terrifying.
That one of them started urinating on our bathroom rugs was unnerving. Then one of them started peeing on the bed. Then I woke up one morning to find a mysterious pool of blood in the hallway and so we were off to the vet again. The first to go was Hank, as I assumed the newest member of the household was the most likely culprit of whatever was happening. As they could find anything wrong with him, Ags was next at bat. She was found to have a UTI, likely induced by stress. Blood tests revealed potential kidney issues, so she is now on special food. The blood found on the floor was possibly the result of her so thoroughly suppressing the urge to pee.
It became increasingly obvious things were not going to work out, as what was happening wasn’t fair to the one who had been here first, and who had taken years to get acclimated. Admittedly, Hank was wonderful in a few ways, but I’m not sure he ever would have been as much of a family member as Ags and our previous cats have been. He seemed to have three distinct modes: intense playfulness, epic (and nearly catatonic) catnaps, and feral. Something else we inherited from our neighbor was her house’s mouse infestation, and Hank dispatched at least one of those, which I greatly appreciated. But the cuddling he so loved while in the basement seemed to largely be a thing of the past. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed our play sessions, though I always seemed to lose steam while he showed no signs of winding down. No wonder Aggie was so stressed out.
We tried to find a home for him, to no avail. I find the mentality of people when adopting animals to be odd. It seems like so few people are interested in a cat or dog unless they initiate the acquisition, such as going to a shelter. Trying to pass on a “used” cat proved to be as difficult and baffling to me as when we tried to give away solid wood furniture we no longer wanted, the kind of thing that largely isn’t even available anymore.
And so, yesterday, Hank was accepted for admittance into the local shelter’s adoption program. They call it the “cat surrender” program, and giving up is how I would describe my actions. I worry I didn’t give him enough time to see if everything might work out differently, then I look at Ags less than twelve hours since he’s been gone and I can see the relief.
I try to spin this as the first (and, hopefully, only) time I have fostered a cat, yet the only thing I feel is that I betrayed Hank. I realize how indulgent self-loathing is, but I’m going to be struggling for a while with how much I hate myself for this. It is a more intense hatred than others used to tell me I should feel towards whoever once hit me with their car and put me in a coma. Right now, nobody can despise me more than I can. I have an exclusive lock on that.
So now I need to work out how to get past that. The shelter is supposed to call when he gets a new home, and I hope that us paying his adoption fee will help to grease the wheels of that transaction. Perhaps then I can start on the road to forgiving myself.
